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Google Co-op will seal fate of few Vertical Search engines

October 24, 2006 — smallpanda

Google Co-op will seal fate of few Vertical Search engines
Have you heard about Google Co-op? You can build your own vertical search engine on top of Google using Google Co-Op !!!!!
Though this is released in May but now it has gone in full public mode and anybody can access this co-op partner program from Google.

Now think for a second what will happen to those vertical search engines having invested millions in building their own solutions!!! I think some of them are doomed unless they have value added service in addition to the vertical search. Let’s take example of Vertical Job sites (avoiding naming some of them😉, some of them are plain vanilla ones without any value addition. Now with Google Co-op anybody (with little higher technical knowledge) can launch a vertical job search engine in few days time. And on top they can put the investment completely to value addition services making mockery of the independent vertical search engines (non-Google ones)!!!

Remember: There is always room for innovations and in my example I am taking cases of those which are dummy vertical search engines)

For me now the real Vertical Search Engine war has begun. Also I think with this, Google is combining social search with vertical flavour and allowing community to mushroom around it.

Google has played the check step and launching the community soldier to play checkmate step.🙂

Pranob,
Yes Google is playing catch up but I think in terms of their reputation as Numero Uno Search Engine, any vertical search engine built on top of it will attract lot of credibility on search results.
Also taking their AdSense user number into account, it is bound to create a good number of community verticals around it.

I know how hard it is to develop a job search engine (I’ve developed one before–it never took off).

I had never heard of Google Co-Op before reading this post. My first response after looking at Google’s site is “so what? People could just use Google?” But then I start to think of all the net users who aren’t quite up to date in terms of net savvy-ness. People who will enter the wrong criteria in any Google search and never ever find what they are looking for.

This will be a good tool, I think. I just hope I don’t start seeing a Google search on every website (right next to the Google Adwords banner on every website).

Good post, smallpanda! Yes, there has been a lot of speculation about how Google Coop and Google-based custom search engines will affect existing Vertical Search engines.

I think it won’t be that easy to compete with specialized VSEs though, because typically the leaders in this space offer a lot more than pure search within each vertical, such as domain-specific services, additional data sets, mashups, parametric search, and so on.

My blog post on this topic “Bring it on, Google!” goes into greater detail, with responses from different vertical search engine leaders.

Google’s Co-OP initiative is admirable. However, not until it recognizes that searchers want exceedingly relevant search results – will be nothing more than ad advertising billboard along the highway. Crawling, indexing and returning mediocre search results were once a luxury. Rapid fire innovation, from search technology startups (such as Just-Posted.com – http://www.Just-Posted.com) are paving way for a vastly improved user experience.